Holy Motors Randomised

Holy Motors is a cinephile odyssey, taking its viewers on a linear, perhaps cyclical journey through a series of variations on film history, performance, and identity. Or, with its continually shifting interplays between character and situation, we might think of it as a live-action replay of the ultimate meta-cartoon, Duck Amuck. The set-up is deceptively simple: we first meet Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) as a businessman leaving his lavish home for work, waving goodbye to his loving family, and being collected by the driver of his white stretch limo, Céline (Édith Scob). On the seat next to him are the details of nine assignments he must complete today. Each one requires a different disguise and costume, and sends M. Oscar out of the car, onto the streets of Paris and into a different performance, for no visible audience (except us), and to no obvious purpose. We watch as he goes about his daily business of acting the roles that may keep families, business, art running from day to day. But we’re never sure of his motives or his masters, nor whether there is a real M. Oscar underneath all of the layers of performance.

Spectacular Attractions Video Podcast #004: Speaking for Ventriloquism

Last week, I traveled to Bournemouth to give a talk at the Arts University. I think I got lucky with the weather, and it was a pleasure to enjoy the mild temperatures, intermittent sunshine and bouts of dryness. The other pleasure was addressing Bournemouth’s staff and students. They managed to sit still for a full hour while I pontificated about ventriloquism and cinema. This was the first outing for some new research I’m working on, drawn from a bigger (and long-gestating, oft-delayed) project on Cinema and Puppetry. It’s coming along slowly, but it’s getting there and gathering some speed now that I have more time to devote to it. AUB’s Animation Research Pipeline talks (of which this was one) provides a space for people like me to share work in progress.

I made a complete screen recording of my talk, and while my voice is quite clearly recorded, some of the sound on the clips might need you to raise the volume once or twice. I hope you enjoy it, but I’d love to hear any comments you have, good or bad; it’s not a short lecture, and the first half is quite theoretical, but I promise you it contains good stuff on Charlie McCarthy, The Great Gabbo, Lon Chaney in drag, Mel Gibson having a fight with a glove-puppet beaver, and tastefully coloured Keynote slides.

Here’s the video. It’s available in HD, which should help you if you want to read the text on the slides:

• If you’d like to hear more of the wonderful Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy radio shows, there are plenty of episodes freely available online, especially at the Internet Archive. I have previously posted on this site their 1936 short film Nut Guilty, which is well worth ten minutes of your time. I refer in the talk to a saucy exchange between Charlie and Mae West: you can hear part of it here. 
• You can found out much more about Steven Connor’s superb book Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism here. The book’s website includes many links to further information and articles.

Things You Need to Know About Le Mépris

[BLOG IN PROGRESS. I started this post hoping it might be of benefit to my students. As much as I love the film, I know it can be off-putting to non-film specialists, and to plenty of other people unfamiliar with Jean-Luc Godard's style of filmmaking. I intend it to be an ongoing post, and will add to it periodically, so if you have any thoughts about the film, or anything you think that viewers need to know about Le Mépris in order to get maximum interest from it, leave a comment below with your ideas and suggestions.]

In summary, it’s part domestic drama, in which a man tries to find out why his wife no longer loves him, and part meta-cinematic backstage dramatisation of the adaptation process, in which that man struggles with his job as a screenwriter on an American film of Homer‘s Odyssey. Filmed as the Hollywood studio system collapsed, Le Mépris is a meditation on the relationship between art and life, film and reality.

Peter Tscherkassky’s Instructions

I started writing this post about the films of Peter Tscherkassky nearly three years ago, and never finished it: that happens sometimes, if I don’t have time to complete a bit of writing, or I lose my train of thought, or if I come across an article that says exactly what I wanted to say. I can’t remember what happened to this one, but I was reminded of the unfinished piece when I attended a talk by Tscherkassky at the newly opened EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam. It was the first time I’d seen the films projected on film, and it reignited an interest that had begun for me after seeing them on DVD and trying to use some of them in my teaching. Listening to him explain the incredibly painstaking methods he uses to create his films made me think the least I could do was knock out a few words in response.

Spectacular Attractions Video Podcast #003

Here, in four chapters, is a lecture I gave to undergraduate students in the Department of English at The University of Exeter in 2010. The students had already watched the film, so if you haven’t seen it, you should probably avoid this talk until you have, as it discusses important plot developments. The title I was given was “The Politics of Privacy”, but my talk doesn’t address that idea directly: Michael Haneke’s Cache was one of several texts for that week on a module dealing with personal expression in writing and film, often focusing on postcolonial subjects. My lecture introduces students to the film and suggests some ways to interpret it and start to unravel its mysteries.

For reasons of upload limits, I have had to divide this lecture into four segments,. These were obviously not planned breaks, so each chapter will start and stop a little abruptly, I’m afraid. If anyone’s interested, I’ll also post the complete audio file for the lecture, but the video version includes slides, text, and video clips that should help to illustrate it, especially when I’m reading out long quotations.

At present, I’m only able to post all four chapters to my YouTube channel, though these are at least available in HD – Vimeo has tighter upload restrictions, so I can’t post all of them yet, but you can find updates, and earlier video podcasts, at my Vimeo page.

Digesting Hugo

These are some preliminary thoughts from a first viewing of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. I’m in the process of writing a chapter on representations of Georges Méliès for a forthcoming book, so this will be one of my primary texts, and I’ll need to watch it again. I thought I would assemble some notes as I go along. As a result, this might read like a string of disjointed observations at times, but hopefully there will be some points of interest for you along the way. I’m happy to discuss the film, too, and I’m aware that it has divided moviegoers in a way that it didn’t necessarily divide the critics. A quick perusal (which is all anyone should usually have to endure) of the IMDB comments page will give evidence of popular objections to the film. It was looking like a weighty flop on its domestic release, but Hugo will probably just about claw back its $170million budget  (the best evidence that this greenlit at a time when it looked like 3D was an infallible cash-cow) when the totals are added up from international markets. So, please leave me a comment if you have an opinion about this film. 

Movie Love Comics: Singin’ in the Rain

This is an adaptation of Singin’ in the Rain, published in Movie Love comics, April 1952, to tie in with the film’s original release. It seems clear that this was not intended to be the first place to encounter the film, but a chance to remember it. Scenes are sketched out so quickly (they have to cram the entire film into 12 pages) that they would surely be difficult to understand if you weren’t already familiar with the film. Before there was home video, and long before you could own a digital copy of a film on a mobile device and replay favourite scenes at any moment, paratexts like comic book adaptations did the job of replaying films for their fans.

Le Havre

Something a little bit miraculous happens while you watch Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre. The film is effortlessly engrossing without ever hitting the marks one might expect in a film about such emotive subject matter. In the eponymous French port, a defeated writer, Marcel Marx (André Wilms), now eking out a living shining shoes, takes in a Gabonese child fleeing the immigration authorities, and goes to great lengths to ensure the child’s safety.

Spectacular Attractions Video Podcast #002

 

In the second of a trio of videos about Stanley Kubrick’s film, this week’s podcast is an audio-visual race through Marvel Comics’ adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Spectacular Attractions Podcast Archive

Last year, I made a series of ten podcasts, mainly to see if I could. It was time-consuming at first, and though it soon became easier once I got the hang of the software, I didn’t have time to keep it going beyond that run of ten. I’d like to try these again in the future, perhaps with a series of interviews (any tips on how best to record Skype or iChat conversations to make them suitable for podcasts would be greatly appreciated), but the next thing I’m going to try is a video podcast. I’ll probably use some of the same subjects, but being able to use clips will make things much easier for me, and hopefully more interesting for you. In the meantime here, in one place, is the whole collection of Spectacular Attractions podcasts to date. You can listen here, or download to play on your own devices:

• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #1: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick,1968)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #2: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #3: Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #4: Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #5: Avalon (Mamoru Oshii, 2002)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #6: Gojira (Ishirō Honda, 1954)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #7: Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #8: Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, 2000)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #9: Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #10: City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)